Shunsho is considered one of the greatest artists of Japan, both as an inventor and powerful colourist. M. Louis Gonse says: “All the collections of coloured prints which are today the delight of the tea-houses; all the fine compositions showing magnificent landscapes and sumptuous interiors; all those figures of actors with heroic gestures and impassive faces behind the grinning masks, and with costumes striking and superb,—came originally from the atelier of Katsukawa Shunsho, who had for a time the monopoly of them.” While the Torii artists were beguiling the Yedo populace with theatrical portraiture, and aiding the growing tendency toward cosmopolitanism by issuing printed albums, books of travel and encyclopedias, art was also expanding at the ancient capital, Kyoto. Sukenobu, the prolific artist, was bringing out beautifully illustrated books, and Okio, from sketching on the earth with bamboo sticks, while following his father and mother to their work in the fields, had risen to be the great founder of the Maruyama school of painting, and the Shijo or naturalistic school was named from the street in which was the studio of the master.
The Popular School, aided by Okio, effected a revolution in the laws of painting at Kyoto, for the Torii artists forsook their academic methods, painting birds, flowers, grass, quadrupeds, insects and fishes from nature. Okio’s name ranks high among the great masters of Japanese art, of whom so many fanciful legends are told. The charming artist with brush and pen, John La Farge, says: “As the fruit painted by the Greek deceived the birds, and the curtain painted by the Greek painter deceived his fellow-artist, so the horses of Kanaoka have escaped from their kakemonos, and the tigers sculptured in the lattices of temples have been known to descend at night and rend one another in the courtyards.”
Then the story is told of a moonlight picture, which, when unrolled, filled a dark room with light. A pretty legend of Tanyu, the great Kano artist, and the crabs at Enryaku Temple, is given by Adachi Kinnotsuke. Upon one panel of the fusuma, or paper screen, is seen a crab, marvellously realistic, only with claws invisible. On the other panels the artist had painted its companions, and at the bidding of his patron furnished them with claws. “Nevertheless,” the master declared, “I warn you that if I give these crabs claws they will surely crawl out of the picture.” As the visitor glances from the wonderful counterfeit crab to the four empty panels beside it, he knows the old master had only spoken the truth.
Under the Cherry Blooms. By Kiyonaga, the regenerator of Torii, whose classic figures recall, in their dignity and simplicity, the methods of the early Italian master.
And so with Okio. He breathed into his pictures the breath of life. His animals live, and his flights of storks swoop across the great kakemonos, each bird with an individuality of its own, though one of a multitude of flying companions. To view Okio aright, we should see him at home in his own environment, not in Europe, where so many copies of his masterpieces abound. John La Farge gives us a glimpse of an Okio, fitly set, framed in oriental magnificence, in the Temple of Iyemitsu at Nikko: “All within was quiet, in a golden splendour. Through the small openings of the black and gold gratings a faint light from below left all the golden interior in a summer shade, within which glittered on golden tables the golden utensils of the Buddhist ceremonial. The narrow passage makes the center, through whose returning walls project, in a curious refinement of invention, the golden eaves of the inner building beyond. Gratings, which were carved, and gilded trellises of exquisite design, gave a cool, uncertain light. An exquisite feeling of gentle solemnity filled the place. In the corridor facing the mountain and the tomb, a picture hangs on the wall. It is by Okio. Kuwannon, the Compassionate, sits in contemplation beside the descending stream of life.”
About 1775 arose a legitimate successor to the school of Torii in the adopted son of Kiyomitsu, Kiyonaga. He discarded the theatrical tradition of his school, but the boldness of his drawing was foreign to the style of Harunobu. “His brush had a superhuman power and swing.” He rivalled the three great masters, Koriusai, Shigemasa, founder of Kitao, and Toyoharu of Utagawa, and the masters of Ukiyo-ye, forsaking their individual predilections, flocked to his studio.
The simplicity and dignity of the early Italian masters, sought after and adored by the pre-Raphaelite brotherhood, their noble lines and contours, are again realized in the panels of Kiyonaga. Professor Fenollosa said that “classic” is the instinctive term to apply to Kiyonaga, and that his figures at their best may be placed side by side with Greek vase painting. Ideally beautiful is the fall of his drapery, determining the lines of the figure in the fewest possible folds. In indoor scenes he almost rivalled Harunobu, but he loved best to paint in the open air. In imagination we see Kiyonaga, the lover of beauty, gazing at the wealth of lotus blooms which fill the moats of feudal Yedo, and in the crucible of his fancy transmuting them into the forms of women. The lotus, of all flowers, has the deepest art significance, and is the oldest motive. The author of “Greek Lines,” Henry Van Brunt, said: “The lotus perpetually occurs in oriental mythology as the sublime and hallowed symbol of the productive power of nature. The Hindu and the Egyptian instinctively elevated it to the highest and most cherished place in their Pantheons.”
It is the flower of religion, of beauty, and of love. From the ocean the Hindu Aphrodite, Lachsmi, ascended. Isis in Egypt reigned, crowned by the lotus, and there the tender, flowing lines became sublime, monumental, fitted to symbolize death and eternal repose. In Japan its joyous curves represent life, immortality, and, delicately sensuous, they conjure up visions of ideal beauty. The lotus, sweetly blooming before the artist’s eye, expanded into a vision of fair women, whose lissom forms he clothed with swirls of drapery. And the women of Japan, enamoured of these enchanting poses, endeavoured to assume the curves of Kiyonaga, sheathing their delicate limbs in silken draperies, and simulating in their enchanting slenderness the stems of flowers—or, to borrow a beautiful simile from Lafcadio Hearn, “looking like a beautiful silver moth robed in the folding of its own wings.”
It is said that every Japanese actor-print was a potential poster, and, alas! the fashion-plate is endeavouring to mold itself upon the most exaggerated type of the degenerate offspring of the genius of the Torii School.